historical women Quotes

A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.

Mary Queen of Scots is the most 'normal' girl who became a queen that I have ever written about.

I like powerful women, and I gravitate to any point in history when a female has significant power. I can spend hours researching any such amazing lady, from Ching Shih to Hatshepsut to Boudica to Zenobia.

Until feminists started wailing about the female's passivity, submissiveness, and something called 'victim status,' I had no idea women were such doormats. My childhood was populated by Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Pearl Buck, Marie Curie, Clare Boothe Luce, and the Duchess of Windsor.

I really want to help write women back into history.

Of how many women might the history be comprised in those few words - 'she lived, suffered, and was buried'!

Certainly, I am writing as a 21st-century woman, so I am much more inclined to view her as a three-dimensional woman. I think we keep coming up with this stubborn problem of a woman being judged by her appearance rather than her accomplishments. We are much more inclined to ask: was Cleopatra beautiful?

Look at history; all the interesting women were deeply flawed.

Good women are no fun... The only good woman I can recall in history was Betsy Ross. And all she ever made was a flag.

I've been working on the lost history of technical women.

There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all.

I went to an exhibition at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called 'The Ten Beauties of Shanghai'.

Anne Boleyn is an intriguing character. She seems to appeal to modern-day women in a very potent way. Because she was such an independently opinionated and spirited young woman, which at the time was unheard of.

[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.

There's no shortage of female role models. They're everywhere - in history, in literature, in the news. Just look around.

I'm so intrigued by women throughout history where the significance of what they were representing at that time is obscured by the fact a man saved them or they were prostitutes.

In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.

There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

When we look at these historical women and what they've gone through, it's shocking to recognize some of our own experiences in theirs. When you look at someone like Ada Lovelace who is the first computer programmer, during her lifetime doctors said that was really sick because she was trying to use a masculine kind of brain that she didn't have. Today, her legacy of being the first programmer is stil disputed.